Sunday, May 06, 2007

It's windy as sin around here the last week or two, and whenever I question why we don't have those wind turbines on every street corner, I'm laughed at and scolded about the supposed "expensive" costs. Well, it seems like I'm not the fool here. It'scost effective to make, way less footprint on the enviroment, and they're just fucking cool to look at. Saskatchewan, time to step up and harness your greatest foe!

Dunno if anyone else was aware of this, but it was a revelation to me: It is now possible to read and write NTFS volumes in OS X! For those of us with Boot Camp, it's a good ability to have.

I installed Boot Camp a couple months ago, and made the partition as FAT32, so I could read and write to the Windows drive from my Mac desktop. Comes in handy when find something on the web I want to try in Windows, but don't want to have to save the bookmark (or download) in my Gmail, reboot to Windows, log in and find it again...just drag n drop the thing to the Windows desktop folder.

Anyways, as everyone who cares to know knows, FAT32 limits your partition to 120GB, and your biggest files to 4GB. Which is pretty much useless these days if your doing video or any other giant file stuff. While my Boot Camp partition is only 32GB, I don't use it enough to make it bigger at the moment.

Which leads me to the new solution (as usual, it's brought to us in part by our Google overlords, all hail!). As I understand it, there's this thing called "FUSE" in the Linux world, and it's some sort of mechanism, that allows stuff to work (I know, pretty technical). Anyways, some brilliant folks have ported it to the Mac, to create MacFuse. MacFuse allows us to run Fuse-compatible things in Mac OS X...in particular, NTFS-3G, the package that allows reading AND writing to NTFS volumes.

So, all I had to do was download the MacFuse Core installer, and the NTFS-3G (contains two installers). Install them in that order, reboot, and my Boot Camp drive now shows up with full read and write ability (after converting it in Windows to NTFS). Slick.